Can an iPhone Really Stop a Shotgun Blast?

Back in May, we published a story about how an iPhone saved a young man in Britain from major injury when he was blasted by a sawn-off shotgun. Like the apocryphal story of the soldier saved when his Bible stopped a bullet, it sounds unbelievable. So the guys at The Firearms Blog decided to do a little science on the iPhone shotgun story.

In the video below, James from TFB fires a Remington 870 short-barrel shotgun at several iPhones from varying distances to put the tale to the test. From a distance of 15 feet, he shoots a 5C that's taped to a squash meant to simulate the flesh of a person. It explodes, yet the iPhone itself performs remarkably at halting the shot. Even from 10 feet away the phone seems to stop the shot that hits it, though the force of the blast creates an iPhone-sized indentation in the tree to which the device was attached.

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